22 City Opera. He took her on, starting h A . d ." \ . d f l\. T " er as na ne In t1.na ne au axos, last October, and casting her as Tosca in the company's final performance in the spring. (The Times: "Voices of this calibre are said to be almost nonexistent in this country, but here was a singer who produced tones of opulence, power, wide range and who used them with mature, musical effect." The W orld- T ele gram: "1 can recall no T osca of our own day who comes near I\/liss Morris.") This season, in addition to T osca, she will sing Salome, Amneris in "Aïda," and Santuzza in "Cavalleria R . "" A . d h ustIcana. rIa ne was a toug dish," she told us. "It's a musician's opera. Unless you do it yourself, you don't realize what an excit- ing thing opera singing is. It's something like a sporting event-there's so much physical activi- ty to it." Miss Morris, who trains for these events by consuming a hamburger two' hours before the opening gun, believes there is a con- nection between painting, especially ab- stract and semi-abstract painting, and operatic singing. "In painting, you're concerned with the arrangement of forms," she said. "On the stage, which is your frame, you're concerned with arranging yourself. It's like a picture, only, of course, you're moving. I feel that all the arts are closely connected, so I don't understand why some people are surprised if you paint, act, and sing. I do these things because I have fun do- . h " lng t em. Last summer, Miss Morris and her husband collaborated on a large semi- abstract picture named "Classical Con- flict," which was recently shown at 'ViJdensteil).'s. They painted it, simul- taneously or separately, whenever they felt so inclined. "It represents a sort of coördination of feeling," she said. Her '-' typical country morning, she told us, in- cluÇles a couple of hours of singing and musical study, work on two gardens-- one flower, one vegetable-and some fooling around with a bunch of pigeons known as Swiss mondaines. These she characterized as big, fat, white, lazy, and the progenitors of numerous off- spring, which she calls demimondaines. "I love to eat squabs, but mine are too cute to eat," she said, reversing a com- mon pl:rase. Afternoons, in the country (in town it's just one rehearsal after another), she paints for two or three hours, then plays tennIS at the Lenox Club, usually with her husband. He came in at the tail end of our interview and observed that his wife is a devotee of Hindu phIlosophy, that this enables her to remain detached in the midst of a highly competitive musical world, and that she is descended from a long line of blue-nosed Dutch clergymen who would jointly turn in their graves at the spectacle of their scion portraying ladies of such dubious reputation as Salome, Tasca, and Santuzza. . I NCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE: The New Jersey state headquarters of Selective Service has moved into offices in Newark previously occupied by the Insti- tute of Practical Draft- . lng. The Department of State is in receipt of a message from one of its representatives in Muk- den reporting that the Northeast Bandit Sup- pression Headquarters, an agency of the Chinese government in IVlanch uria, has asked for American aid in comhatting a plague of aphids. There's a cozy-looking tourist home on a highway running south from Sel- lersv lle: P ennsy I vani , called Macbeth Manor. A1oney,A1oney, oney B y a neat paradox, the ten-cent subway fare not only brings in almost twice as much money as the nickel fare but makes life considerably easier for the people who have to han- dle the take. The reason is, of course, that dimes weigh a lot less than nickels; a million dollars in dimes weighs only twenty-seven tons, whereas a million dollars in nickels weighs a hundred and nine tons. We gathered these and other crum bs of fiscal information in the course of a pleasant session with :\1r. J. A. McGurgan, assistant general su- perintendent of the Revenue Depart- ment of the Board of T ransportatiun, in his office at B. of T. headquarters, 250 Hudson Street. McGurgan, a stocky gentleman with silver-rimmed spectacles and hair to match, joined the Inter- borough system when it was formed, in 1904, and is now rounding out enough years to have learned by experience how much a million dollars in nickels weighs. He gave us to understand, however, that nickels are already old hat around the Revenue l)epartment-too few to give OCTOBER 9, '9 4- .8 much thought to. Even in July, the first month of the nevI fare, out of a total revenue of $12,918,675.88 a mere $96,231.10 was in nickels, against $4,320,710.80 in dimes. The rest was in pennies ( from transfers) , larger coins, and one- and two-dollar bills. "People sometimes wonder why station agents don't change anything higher than a two-dollar bill," Mr. McGurgan remarked. "\ ell, it's because we hold the agents responsible for any counter- feit money they accept, and we figure it would be too easy for counterfeiters to fob off five- and ten-dollar bills on them d'-:lring rush hours. The chance on smaller bills is negligible, because almost nobody bothers to counterfeit them." At the moment, nearly half a million dollars a day is pouring into Mr. Mc- Gurgan's office from the subway and elevated lines. Setting úut every night at the witching, and comparatively idle, hour of twelve, nine money trains make their ghostly, passengerless rounds of the five hundred and twenty-three stations of the systen1s, picking up from the agents large canvas sacks full of coins and bills. The money trains drop these sacks off at the subway sta- tions nearest the B. of T. headquarters, to which they are then trucked in armored cars leased by the Board and manned by Board policemen. "\Ve've never yet had a robbery," McGurgan said, "or, for the matter of that, an at- tempted robbery. I lay it to the terrihle weight of a bag of money. Grab a couple of thousand dollars in coins and you've got to manage over a hundred pounds. I do believe we could leave the bags stacked on a street corner and nobody would make off with them." Mr. McGurgan invited us to inspect the !)epartment's money room and, opening a steel-wire door, led us past a Board policeman into a room that rang with a metallic clattèr. This racket was caused by twenty-four counting ma- chines the Department uses to tot up receipts. Cashiers were standing in small cages along the walls oÍ the room, separating bills from coins as they came from the canvas sacks. While our eyes g.lazed at the sight of so many hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around loose, with every appearance of being ours for the grabbing, McGurgan ex- plained that the cashiers count the paper currency manually, baling it into thou- sand-dollar packets, and turn the hard money over to the operators of the counting machines. "Those machines," he såid, "have plates that must be kept slick, and we used to have a good deal of